In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3 Gerald’s Game Postindian Subjectivity in Vizenor’s Interior Landscapes Michael Snyder Gerald Vizenor’s autobiographical text Interior Landscapes is undervalued both in Native American literary studies and in autobiography studies. Although Vizenor’s earlier novels such as Bearheart and The Trickster of Liberty have been the subject of copious academic discourse, Interior Landscapes is relatively neglected. This lack of familiarity and critical attention is unjustified, for the book includes some of Vizenor’s most vibrant, funny, and evocative writing. It is also a self-reflexive work of the intellect that critiques and tests the boundaries of its genre. Helen Cordes writes, “No tame genealogy, this is imaginative adventure, a free-floating composition that redefines the autobiography genre.”1 Anishinaabe critic Kimberly M. Blaeser concurs, stating that Vizenor, in both his theoretical and autobiographical work, challenges “the validity and method of the genre” itself.2 Like Jessie Burlingame, the unfortunate heroine of Stephen King’s novel Gerald’s Game,3 Gerald Vizenor listens in silence and shadows for long-unheard voices from the past and experiences uncanny and sometimes grotesque visions, incorporating them in his autobiographical yet heteroglossic language game. This essay attempts to reconcile to some degree the apparent paradox of Vizenor’s endorsement of Derridean singularity, his postmodern refusal to be pinned down, as positioned within a text evincing a strong sense of “Anishinaabe-ness.” I say apparent paradox because there ironically may be something particularly Anishinaabe about an individual’s insisting on autonomy and singularity, an idea offered to me in conversation by White Earth Anishinaabe scholar Jill Doerfler, who works on Vizenor. Discussing Derrida’s singularity, John Caputo writes, “the singular is not a case that can be subsumed under the universal, not a specimen of a species, but the unrepeatable, unreproducibly idiosyncratic.”4 Derrida stated that in his readings of philosophers and theorists, he strives in each case “to respect the idiom or the singularity of the signature,” a respect that Vizenor wishes to receive.5 Derrida remarked, “Singularity as such (whether it appears as 46 Gerald’s Game 47 such or not) can never be reduced, in its very existence, to the rules of a machine-like calculation, nor even to the most incontestable laws of any determinism.”6 In his crossblood complexity, Vizenor refuses to be “reduced” to a tribal synecdoche. In Fugitive Poses, Vizenor suggests the complexity and paradox of Native self-writing because “Native identities and the sense of self are the tricky traces of solace and heard stories; the tease of creations, an innermost brush with natural reason, precarious visions, and unbounded narcissism.”7 Vizenor’s text is in many ways exemplary as postmodern autobiography, sharing attributes such as intertextuality and self-reflexivity with other contemporary postmodern self-writers. Moreover, it subverts the Enlightenment-humanist and modernist models of the self preceding the postmodern era, which posit a coherent “self” that is coextensive with a certain cultural, social, and religious background. This model, opposed by Vizenor, views self-writing as mimetic and largely transparent. Yet even as Vizenor embraces singularity , refusing to be seen as synecdochal of his tribal affiliation, he serves up a heaping helping of tribally specific Anishinaabe trickster tales and references to Anishinaabe land, ancestry, and historical figures. In a graduate seminar on Native American autobiography and theory, Craig S. Womack argued that in Interior Landscapes Gerald Vizenor succeeds in creating an “Ojibwe text”—as opposed to a text about Ojibwes. Womack furthermore stated that Vizenor’s freewheeling series of autobiographical stories constitute an “Ojibwe performance” and thus presence.8 According to Womack, two means by which Vizenor creates an Ojibwe book are, first, citing and quoting from numerous Ojibwe sources and, second , retelling and alluding to Ojibwe traditional stories. Womack wanted to write “a Creek book” with his seminal critical text Red on Red: Native American Literary Nationalism, which establishes and analyzes a canon of Creek national literature and draws from Creek storytelling.9 Along with this work, Womack’s novel Drowning in Fire, its fictional companion, engages Creek history and narrative tropes.10 Though Vizenor’s work often lends itself to tribal nationalist readings, his theory has opposed nationalisms and separatisms of all stripes. In a recent (2008) publication , he specifically accuses the “native literary nationalists” of performing “nostalgic” and “reductive” readings of Native American literary works.11 In spite of this objection, Interior Landscapes, like most of Vizenor’s creative work, provides for the Native American literary nationalists a fruitful text for their...

Share